


Dream Of Leaving Alive

by badwips



Category: Justified
Genre: Misgendering, No Character Death, Pre-Series, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-23 09:21:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9649568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badwips/pseuds/badwips
Summary: Raylan Givens. Beloved daughter of Frances and Arlo. 1970-





	1. 1984

He wipes his nose too late, there’s already a drop of bright blood blooming on the yellow gingham tablecloth, right next to his plate of scrambled eggs. He’s very lucky not to have lost a back tooth, one feels like it could be loose. 

‘Lean your head back,’ Aunt Helen’s voice, Raylan sees her upside down when he does as she says. She runs her hand over the side of his face that isn’t bruised and hands him a floral kerchief that he knows was her grandma’s. Sitting down at his elbow, she looks stern and he can tell it’s put on. ‘You know, if you want to beat those boys at their own game, Raylan, you’ve gotta play it how they do.’ 

He doesn’t know what she means right away, he thought he was playing their game when he got into the scuffle, when he didn’t let them say what they wanted to, he gave as good as he got. 

‘You said it started because some fella’s little filly was giving you the eyes at the game? They didn’t think that was the proper thing.’ 

He nods.

‘And she came to help you, picked you out of the dirt when they’d scattered?’

Another nod, pressing the handkerchief closer to his face.

‘Well, how’re you gonna thank that girl, Raylan, for treating you decent?’

He’d never considered anything like that, hardly had time to speak to her, honestly hoping that he’d get to school on Monday and everyone involved would have decided to forget the whole thing. Aunt Helen looks at him like there’s one hope left for him and only she can access it, reaching over to squeeze his free hand. 

‘Take her to the movies. Buy her popcorn. Make nice like her fella isn’t and show them who came out on top. They’ll get upset, but you’ll still have someone on your side, guaranteed. Three people. Me, your mama and your new girlfriend.’


	2. 1983

The fugitive fell to the ground, shot, and Raylan holstered his gun. 

It was close range, lower than central mass. The man can’t help himself, screaming and thrashing, clutching his belly, bleeding out fast.

‘Shit, didn’t your mama teach you how to bleed?’

All the man offered in reply to Raylan’s observation was more pained moaning.

‘My mama taught me. I was a real late bloomer, in a lot of ways, and I don’t know if it got to me early or not, being roundabout the end of middle school. I think they made us wear white shorts for gym class, in coal country, just to keep our families buying soap, and you know what else, my luck, it was after Labor Day. Got myself in trouble for wearing a shirt tied around my waist. Wasn’t the strictest school as such, but there was some propriety to be followed. Funny, ‘cause it was my Science teacher who sent me to the principal when I downright refused to do as I was asked. Called my mother. I sit in blood all day, ‘cause she’s at work. She picks me up, looks over at pasty little me and says, ‘wipe your tears, you’re still livin’.’

The fugitive gets his voice back, ‘–the fuck are you talking about?’

Raylan steps forward, nudges the man’s wound with the toe of his boot, causing him to sputter. ‘My mama taught me to shoot, too. I think she did a pretty good job of both.’


	3. 1980

There’s nothing to see outside of the truck, Raylan only lets his mind linger on the dull thump of his shoulder against the door. It’s a rhythm, slightly soothing, not enough to drown out his father biting out his words, cursing out his mother. He’s putting as much room between himself and Arlo as possible, it’s miraculous Arlo let him follow at all– there’s a chance he might not have even noticed Raylan beside him; a silly little wish while he can still believe in such things. Every word his father spits makes Raylan feel sicker and he’s squeezing his hands into fists so tightly that his knuckles look transparent in the moonlight.

As soon as they stop, he chases him out. Not saying anything, not daring. 

He knows exactly where they are. 

He’d found his mama sitting at the bottom of the stairs and Arlo nowhere to be seen, probably out back in his hidey hole putting something together to cause more pain, maybe taking out his rage on something else, so time felt limited. Frances wanted to cut Raylan’s hair. Sitting him down, each thing she did was serene and careful and she’d tap his cheek to get him to turn if he tried to look at her, what he’d done to her. Eventually, he just asked her to cut it shorter and kept himself still. She started to tell him about Noble’s Holler, that he’d always have a place there if he needed it, if he needed to run, that’s where safety sat. 

There’s men with guns pointed at his daddy and Raylan is surprised he wasn’t felled on sight. Arlo is shouting himself hoarse, right up until one man approaches him and shuts him up with his fists. Nobody else intervenes. Raylan knows that he isn’t safe here, despite what his mother said, when the man in the hat tells Arlo, ‘take your boy and don’t come back.’


	4. 1970-

Never in his life has Raylan been told that it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Sentiments, as such, don’t go far in Harlan County.

It’s enough that from the age of five, Frances lets him choose jeans over a sundress and never once pushes him into changing his mind. He might not have thanked her, at the time, not seeing a reason to. When he’s older and tired of seeing his baby pictures– it could be someone else’s kid– he makes sure she loses them on the move from home to home. She blames Arlo for it, only raising the point a single time and getting irate confusion as a response, so usual that it doesn’t stand out and Raylan never feels bad about it.

Nobody stops him from playing with other kids. He romps around in the woods and skins his knees and gets into tussles. When his mother runs into people at the market, they look at him in his little coveralls and comment that he’ll grow up to be a real ladykiller and she doesn’t acknowledge it. Little Raylan wonders what it means. He doesn’t want to kill anyone.

He’s forgotten that by the time he’s in school, those friends he’d made give him more thought, see something off in him and the friendships break up. He likes his own company. He can still do everything he wants to. He gets better by putting himself first and looking after himself foremost. He watches a lot of movies on Sunday afternoons where the hero works alone for the good of everyone else. The hero has the best costume. For a long time, his two main pursuits are books and baseball.

In high school, the latter moves ahead. The uniforms stop swamping him roundabout the time he finds other uses for a bat; knocking down mailboxes, defending himself when someone spits at him or tells him he’d be better off cheerleading. If they try to touch him, they never manage. It seems like a cycle, the way these things repeat– someone will grow some kind of idea about him and the way he proves himself to be nothing more than himself is with violence. Outside of school, as much as he might be enamoured with stories, after a while people always have to stop talking and act. Things start to stick to him and he formulates an idea of who he should be, even when Frances tells him that he shouldn’t let anything get to him. There’s bigger things for him to be afraid of than himself.

Other people’s ideas about him push their way in, self-important, as he grows older, graduates high school. He’s not going to get a baseball scholarship, no way, so off he goes to work and the most readily available occupation is in the mine. Stooping to obscure his shape weakens him. He holds his first paycheck in hand and resolves to make things add up.

It was a damn sight easier to get a fake ID than a real ID in Harlan County and if it took three hours just to drive to the movies, then what was three hours on top of that to go see a doctor? A doctor who would say, yes, Raylan, you’re right. Here’s what you need to be. Simple as that. 

Of course, it isn’t, and Raylan’s level of research is so woefully pitiful that the doctor seems at a loss. There is nobody to deal with this. He gets pamphlets which seem as if they’re encouraging him to doubt himself– he’s too stubborn to do so. Each of his paychecks go into another trip up and further, he lies to his parents both, saying that he’ll be staying with Boyd for a while after work and he drives back home in the evenings, is dog-tired the next day, dangerously so, but it’s all worth it when his boss says he’s a good man, working hard. He can look at himself and see a clear result, if it’s tangible to him, it’s tangible to everyone else.

Sometimes, he runs into people from school or family friends and they’ll either be reticent or too forward, as if Raylan’s existence allows no in-between to survive. Still, he’s grateful for the simplicity. It gets him dates. He tells Frances and she’s shocked, laughing. He tells Arlo when they have a screaming fight and gets a glass thrown at him, one of the good tumblers. He can’t make out what Arlo’s angry about, if it’s even the fact that he’s dating a girl. The way he put gravel into his voice a long time ago was by imitating who Arlo dealt with. Who is at fault? The only time Arlo had a daughter was when it was convenient to him.

Like the punchline to a bad joke, his new doctor tells him to watch his health. The mine doesn’t let anyone go unscathed, physically or otherwise. He hates the pain that works its way inside out, wearies him to nothing, leaving his bedsheets ghostly grey as he can’t be bothered bathing sometimes. He hates the people that surround him, people in Harlan who hate him, too, for his family, his upbringing, anything else, hate under their words even if they’re not speaking aggressively. He doesn’t hate his conversations with Boyd, who knew him from school and wanted to be friends with him, then, but their separate interests didn’t much allow it. Now he has all the time he wants to ask Raylan if he’s read certain books and then wax poetic on them, wending a route away from innocuous topics to Harlan itself, that which he apparently cares about the most. It’s hard to get him to stop talking. Raylan wonders why Boyd has no desire to go to college, figures it must have been thoroughly drummed out of him by his father. Thinking about this makes him consider it for himself. He works harder. Everything catches up on him, then, like he’s reached a point he forgot he had to get to. He leaves the mine, he goes to college, he decides to become a Marshal, and his third doctor asks him if he’s thought about surgeries. He’d considered all of these things to be hypothetical, unrealistic goals. He doesn’t really have the money for all of it and living expenses, too, and somehow that’s what makes the goals realistic, decides his future for him. If he has to pay for his decisions for the rest of his life, so be it, everybody does in their own way, he’s seen it.

He walks back into Harlan after all of this and Tommy Bucks and demands to make them see him, too, without anything more than outward courtesy– he knows his manners. He’s had a very long time to think, to consider individual moments, he’s unaware of how long he’ll have to consider more; people will deliver them to him, often those same people who didn’t like him existing before don’t like him existing as he does now and usually not for his body. Usually, it’s just his family name. Whatever reaction they have to him, he considers it to be something he’s earned.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on prompts given to me by @ironoxide.


End file.
